Taken from my blog at http://gbt.blogspot.com/2004/06/depth-first-browsing-or-breadth-first.html

World Wide Web offers a new way of reading and organizing materials. You don't have to follow a certain path like when you're reading a conventional (paper-based) books. This feature can help or lost you.

In the early years of WWW, I didn't really care about it. There were not many good materials worth serious reading. Now, things have changed. There are many good articles to read and ponder. When I read slashdot, for example, there are many good links with good articles. I am overloaded with information.

To follow these good links and articles, I could pick a topik and follow it to the "bottom". Of course there is no bottom in world wide web. Let's define the bottom is a place where you have enough of the topic. (If you have a better definition, let me know.) This is what I call "Depth First Browsing" (DFB).

Another way to browse is to collect everything that you are interested with and start scanning these topics, the "Breadth First Browsing" (BFB). Yang can organize things that you want to visit in new windows or new tabs, depending on your browser capabilities and your preference. You then explore the many topics at once worrying that if you don't explore them right now they will be gone, or to be exact forgotten by you. The information is still there, but you forgot the location. Or, some of you may bookmarks those topics and visit them later when you have more time (yeah right).

Now, which method do you usually do? Tell me by entering your comments in this blog. I personally do Breadth First Browsing by opening many tabs in my Mozilla Firefox.

Would this be an interesting topic to research?

With all those free blog sites, are people still writing journals within slashdot? One thing I don't like about slashdot journal is that it is "too simple". I know I might get flames for this, but the reality is there are nicer (in terms of appearance) blogsites today. As for my fav blogsites, it is still blogger.com. What do you think?

I am thinking of writing a book (about 300 pages). Has anybody used OpenOffice to write long documents? How's the stability? Do you have multiple files or just one big file?

I have had bad experience with Microsoft Word when writing long documents (crashes, won't print, corrupted, etc.). So I am not going to use it. Previously I used FrameMaker (for engineering docs or just long documents) and LaTeX (for documents that have lots of mathematical equations). Any suggestion?

-- br